


my heart (and lungs) ache for you

by cap_and_cyborg



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Relationships, F/F, Hanahaki Disease
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 06:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30084582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cap_and_cyborg/pseuds/cap_and_cyborg
Summary: After Quynh is taken from Andromache, Andy gets sick with Hanahaki disease.  Until her love is requited once more, she will continually die from the flowers blooming in her lungs.  Which, while painful, doesn't really matter to a regenerating immortal.  Until suddenly her immortality is gone, and her life has a countdown.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	my heart (and lungs) ache for you

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you that haven't read a Hanahaki disease AU before, the basic premise is that unrequited love makes flowers bloom in your lungs and they will kill you if you don't tell the person that you love them or if they don't return your feelings. You can get surgery to remove the flowers, but it also takes your feelings for that person away, so many people don't go that route. The flowers usually have meaning, same in this fic, and the meanings are in the end notes. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> This was written for Femslash Fortnight over on tumblr!

Yusuf and Nicolò burst into Quynh and Andromache’s cell, covered in blood and ready to spill more, to find a lone woman slumped against the wall.

She looked up at them, her eyes dead.

“It’s too late,” she croaked.

Their eyes widened as they took in her words. The blood on her wrists, the floor. The lack of their other sister.

“...Quynh?” Yusuf asked, his voice quivering. They are both shaking in front of her, the adrenaline of their fighting crashing in the worst possible way. 

“Gone,” Andromache said, her voice twisted and broken. “And… that’s not all.”

She coughed and a bloody flower falls from her lips.

She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to watch as all she had revealed sunk in. 

She far preferred the darkness found behind her eyelids than the reality in front of her.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Andy had died two hundred and forty-nine times from the disease in her lungs by the time that Nile joined her group. While her body reset with every death, whether it had to do with Hanahaki or not, the flowers always came back. A bitter reminder of the one she had lost.

The first time she coughed up a petal around Nile, they were eating their first meal altogether. Nile’s eyes were darting around, unsure where to look. Joe and Nicky had told their story, so had Booker. Nile asked her how old Andy was. Her chest tightened and she put down her bowl. The men at the table knew what was coming, but Andy still saw Nicky’s brow furrow as she began to cough. He had been to college multiple times for medicine, trying to find a way to alleviate her pain. There was nothing he could do. Not anything, not without Quynh there. And though they had searched for her until they had almost lost themselves, there was no sign of the iron coffin that had become her tomb.

Nile stared at Andy, then the bloody petal in her hand.

“Better get used to it, kid, it isn’t something that can be fixed,” Andy said.

Joe winced and Booker handed Andy his flask. She took it and chugged a mouthful, hoping the taste of carnations would be washed away.

She’d had countless kinds of flowers emerge from her chest over the centuries: pink camellias, forget-me-nots, salvias, yarrow… the list went on. Eventually, she stopped looking up their meanings.

They all came down to this: Andy loved Quynh to this day, and she ached to have her back by her side.

“Is it… not requited?” Nile asked tentatively.

Andy snorted.

“Not in the traditional sense,” Nicky said, taking the responsibility of answering. “Andy’s wife is unable to return her love and that is why she is still sick.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Tell her about when you two idiots both had it,” Booker said, and Andy looked at him and sent him silent thanks.

Joe smiled, his eye wrinkles out in their full glory. “This is years after the Crusades, and one morning, I wake up with heliotropes dripping from my lips. I didn’t want to tell Nicky, so I hid them from him.”

“Little did he know that earlier that day, before he had woke, I had coughed up violet petals,” Nicky said, smiling over at his husband.

“Stupidity ensued,” Booker said with a small grin.

“Until one day we both coughed in front of one another and noticed the flowers. It took a while for us both to admit our feelings. Didn’t help that I was angry at the idea that someone out there didn’t love Nicky back,” Joe said, laughing.

“Only for us to realize that we had both thought our love to be unrequited when in reality, it very much was,” Nicky said.

Andy shook her head, taking another swig of Booker’s flask before handing it back. 

“Idiots,” she said with a small smile.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Her shoulder wasn’t healing.

Her fingers came away red after she brushed them over the stab wound. It was partially healed, but still bleeding sluggishly. She quickly left the mine and went to the nearest town.

She grabbed all the first aid supplies she could think she would need. It had been a long fucking time since she had needed to patch herself up after a fight, but she had done field medicine on others, on  _ mortals _ , much more recently.

In the end, she didn’t need to. In her six thousand years of life, Andy had somehow forgotten about the kindness of strangers.

“We also have cough drops, if you would like,” the woman, Celeste, said as she helped Andy put on her coat again.

“Thank you. That would be good.”

Andy got back to her car and shut the door behind her. Her lungs were burning, but she didn’t let herself cough. She had died on the killing room floor just a few days ago, so she had a while before the disease got bad again. A few petals here and there, then full flowers, until she was unable to breathe around the growth in her lungs. The longest she had made it from the beginnings of the disease to her inevitable death was nine months.

When she was immortal, that had hardly mattered. 

Now though… 

Now she was running out of time.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Hey, if they can examine the Hanahaki in your lungs, they might be able to find a way to stop it. And I can finally move on and be with my family. It could work out for both of us.”

Her side bled and bled and bled.

“Oh, Book.” There were tears clogging her throat, petals right behind them. 

“What have you done?”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Bloody flowers fell from Andy’s lips.

“Fuck.”

The sentiment was echoed around their safe house.

Nile, Joe, and Nicky were all staring and trying not to stare as Andy went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea to soothe her throat. 

She had been drinking a lot of tea these days. And taking a lot of naps. And sleeping in general. When she was awake, she felt lethargic. She had bruised her ribs from coughing so much and her throat was constantly inflamed.

It had been seven months since they had left Booker at that pub. Andy felt twinges of emotion about it daily, though the emotion itself changed constantly. Grief, anger, understanding, betrayal, sadness. They all flowed through her.

Nile’s phone rang.

“Hello?” she asked, her voice curious but guarded. “Book? WHAT?!”

They all focused on her.

She looked up, directly at Andy.

“Quynh got out of the coffin. She’s been recovering with Book for a month,” Nile said, her eyes filling with tears.

Her smile made them spill over, it was so big and full of hope.

“She wants to see you again.”

“Andy,” Nicky said gently, ever the voice of reason, “if you see her and she doesn’t return your love, it will accelerate the disease. You will die in days, not weeks.”

Andy nodded, glad of the fact that no mention of surgery was mentioned. Surgically taking out the flowers inside Andy’s lungs would remove the disease, but also remove her ability to love Quynh anymore.

And that really wasn’t an option for Andy.

“I’ll risk it. At least…” she trailed off, her thoughts too private to be spoken.

_ At least I’ll die having seen her again. _

By the looks on her family’s faces, split between fear and hope, they knew what she had thought anyways.

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


They went to France. Marseille, specifically, and Andy let herself be glad that Booker had gone to his home city. It gave her hope for him.

They let themselves into the safe house, Nile insisting on going first.

“I don’t think it is a trap, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be smart about this,” she said.

Andy knew that Joe, Nicky, and Nile were all carrying a small army’s worth of weaponry, but she hadn’t bothered. She would live or she would die, one way or another, and she did not want to raise a weapon against Quynh in her final moments.

They entered, the others scanning the room for threats. But there was only Booker, slouched into himself as usual.

“Hey. She’s right through-”

“ _ Andromache…” _ whispered the voice Andy hadn’t heard in five hundred years.

Her eyes snapped to the source and there stood Quynh in black skinny jeans and a deep red sweater, her eyes flinty as she looked at them.

Her smile wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t cruel. “Hello, my love.”

Andy felt something building in her chest and she sprinted to the nearest garbage can, and coughed and coughed and coughed. Petals and buds and flowers came pouring out of her lungs. She felt a soft hand on her back, soothing her through the pain, but she couldn’t tell who it was.

The final carnation fell from her lips and she slumped over the trash can.

She heaved a breath, the first that didn’t burn her lungs since Quynh had been taken from her.

Wiping her mouth on her sleeve, she rose and turned to Quynh.

Her expression was fractured from what it had been. Andy could now see beneath the anger to the Quynh she knew before.

“Hanahaki?” Quynh asked.

Andy nodded. “Since you were taken from me.”

“And still you stopped searching.”

Andy stared straight at Quynh as she said, “Yes.”

“You are mortal now.”

“Yes.”

“And yet, you did not search for me in your final days.”

“That, actually, is not true,” Andy said. “With resources provided by Copley, we have been. Only to find out, you weren’t where we were searching.”

Quynh’s mouth twisted, but Andy knew her face, knew it more than her own, and she saw how she tried to hide her trembling bottom lip. “You could have died, and I would not have seen you again.”

“But that did not happen,” Andy said, risking a step forward.

“I am here,” she said, taking another step.

“And so are you.” Yet another.

“And you still love me, despite everything.” Closer.

“Or else I would be choking on flowers right now, my final death.” Andy was a foot away and finally stopped.

“We have a chance to spend my remaining days together. It won’t be an eternity, but it will be more than I ever expected to be able to have. I know we have much to discuss and many traumas to bear, but I want you, Quynh. I want you with me until the end.”

“Just you and me,” Quynh said, eyes fixed on Andy.

Taking a chance, Andy leaned her head forward, until their foreheads rested against each other. 

“Always,” Andy whispered.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks once again to Rachel, my bffl 5-eva, for looking over this fic and getting that reference. The true MVP
> 
> Flower meanings:  
> Red carnation - Alas for my poor heart, my heart aches  
> Camellia, pink - Longing For You  
> Forget-me-not - True love memories, do not forget me  
> Salvia, blue - I think of you  
> Salvia, red - Forever mine  
> Yarrow - Everlasting love  
> Heliotrope - Eternal love, devotion  
> Violet - Loyalty, devotion, faithfulness
> 
> Come say hi on tumblr: even-after-a-millennia


End file.
